Year in Ideas: As breadwinner women hit the mainstream, feminists look back at the men left behind

Feminists look at the men left behind as breadwinner women hit mainstream

She was celebrated as a feminist success story, lifted aloft for shifting the gender imbalance in women’s favour, for showing that providing financially for ones’ family is no longer just a man’s job.

Though the breadwinner woman had been rising for decades, 2012 was the year she made her star turn — appearing as the subject of popular books and countless news articles, including one book, The Richer Sex by Washington Post journalist Liza Mundy, that projected women will eclipse men as the top household earner by 2030.

But cultural anxieties about what this shift means for the workplace, for parenting and, especially, for men meant successful women were as torn as ever. The female breadwinner talk became all about men and their inevitable decline.

In her book The End of Men and the Rise of Women, Hanna Rosin, a senior editor at The Atlantic, argued that “at this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men; they have pulled decisively ahead in every measure,” and lit a match under the simmering gender wars, angering a surprising cohort: Feminists themselves.

“[After that book came out] there were a number of feminist academics who really felt like they had to come forward and pound that idea, ‘How dare you say that the end of men is occurring — men still rule, men still oppress, women are still victimized, you’re wrong,’” said Ms. Mundy in an interview. “It seems to me some members of the feminist establishment are actually uneasy when you argue that women are making progress.”

Feminists also skewered her book, in which she interviewed many women who earned more than their husbands but still maintained happy homes. The husbands were more likely to be fine with the reality, relieved of the pressure to provide, she said, although some did indeed feel emasculated. Most often, the breadwinner roles are fluid and temporary, she said, changing when one partner is laid off or a baby is born.

Gillian Ranson, a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, says she’s never seen the breadwinner woman discussed as much as it was in 2012. While she stresses this is surely not “the end of men,” she agrees that the certain kind of masculinity discussed by Ms. Rosin in her book — the kind that requires men to feel like the foremost providers on whom women must depend — just doesn’t work today.

But, as with many things, the dynamic is more muted in Canada, where the recession didn’t wipe out as many disproportionately male jobs.

“Obviously there’s going to be a growing proportion of women earning more than their partners when opportunities at work for women are increasing, but we need to be careful about how carried away we get” in calling for the end of men, she said. About 29% of women in Canada out-earn their male partners, but it’s usually just by a slight amount. In dual earner households where women out-earn men, the family income is usually much less than in dual income households where the man makes more money, she said.

‘The breadwinner woman is not balance, the breadwinner woman is just replacing June Cleaver with Ward at home’

It’s dangerous to laud the breadwinner woman so much, especially at the expense of men, says Linda Duxbury, a professor in Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business and one of Canada’s top experts on work-life balance.

“The breadwinner woman is not balance, the breadwinner woman is just replacing June Cleaver with Ward at home,” she said, adding that the strong focus on women having successful and fulfilling jobs has meant fewer children are born, or are born later. “If we don’t solve this one, our population will continue to decline, which will create all kinds of social problems and we’re going to have to bring in our labour market from outside.”

The huge focus on female success over the past decades has definitely come at a cost to boys and men who are not finishing high school at the same rate as girls, she said, and if the headlines were reversed to say ‘The End of Women,’ there would be a moral outrage.

Even successful women who have busted through the glass ceiling were being frank about the unrealistic pressures of being in high powered jobs.

In early July, The Atlantic published an essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former senior foreign-policy director in the Obama administration titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” — a cover story that would become the most shared article in the magazine’s history. The women who manage to be both mothers and top professionals are “superhuman, rich or self-employed,” she wrote, and these top-level jobs are built for men, not women (and mothers) in this new workforce reality.

“It, in a way, sparked the conversation which was fantastic and I hope it continues,” said Andrea Doucet, Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care at Brock University and author of The Bread and Roses Project. “It moved this debate and conversation to a whole new level in the sense that people are now talking about flexibility more and how both women and men … live their lives in terms of how they work and how they care.”

There was a mix of celebration and concern after a very-pregnant Marissa Mayer became Yahoo!’s newest CEO. While feminists cheered at this unprecedented move (it wasn’t long ago that women were laid off on maternity leaves, let alone hired before a baby’s birth), work-life balance proponents and mothers worried that her returning to work so soon after her child’s birth would set a too-ambitious example for women.

“It’s a paradox because we’re being told we never had it so good, yet your average woman is not feeling that way,” said Suzanne Doyle-Morris, the U.K.-based author of Female Breadwinners; How They Make Relationships Work and Why They Are The Future Of the Modern Workforce.

‘What [Ms. Rosin] and I were trying to do is push the conversation forward and acknowledge that men may or may not have ended, women may or may not have won, but things have changed’

In the Slaughter and Mayer examples Ms. Duxbury sees a similar thread: Workload is far too heavy for both men and women, and this is at the root of many of the tensions that, on the surface, appear to be gender-related.

“[Ms. Slaughter] was doing a really high powered job and that job means you’ve got to make sacrifices regardless of your gender. And that’s what she said,” Ms. Duxbury said. “So maybe rather than stopping expecting that we can have it all, we have to stop and say ‘Maybe they’re expecting too much of us at work.’ And I don’t hear that dialogue.”

As 2012 came to a close, anti-feminist author Suzanne Venker weighed in with her take on ‘the end of men’ in a November Fox News essay: Women are at fault for men feeling disenfranchised or moving into care-giving roles, she argued. Her view was widely criticized, but she successfully stoked debate ahead of the release of her new book in early 2013.

And with university enrollment numbers for women continuing to rise, and thus the number of breadwinner women, the resulting effects on work and care will continue to matter in the years ahead.

“What [Ms. Rosin] and I were trying to do is push the conversation forward and acknowledge that men may or may not have ended, women may or may not have won, but things have changed,” Ms. Mundy said. “They’ve changed in my adult lifetime, and even though we can’t have it all … I think we need to change the conversation and inject some of the new facts.”